Febelfin CODA (Coded Statement of Account) 2.3 Only used in Belgium?

Question

I'm tasked with writing some code that interprets CODA files that come from (different) (Belgian) banks.

CODA files stands for Coded Statement of Account files, and seems to be the Belgian name for textual files that have a line for each bank transaction that occured on a specific bank account.

This includes SEPA Direct Debit transaction information.

The first 2 banks we are working with are Belgian (Fortis and ING) , and I received the specification of how these files are encoded from each of them.

I cannot seem to find the english name for these files. I'd be surprised if this really was just a Belgium- only standard. I'm looking for more information as to what would happen if we'd try the hook up our code with let's say a French or British bank

• Is there anyone that can point me to the name of the standard I need to search for?
• Is there even an international standard for this?
• For programmers: Is there any c# or .NET assembly I could use to easily interpret these CODA (2.3) files?. I would like to avoid having to write this critical library myself.

I found out that there exists such thing as mt940 (SWIFT) but those files don't look the same as mine.

Cofield

Hi Mvision. This isn't the right place to ask for programming advice (although there are a bunch of coders on this site.) You should ask this over on stackexchange.com instead. – Naivete

Thanks for moving it for me;-) – Cofield

Answer 1

This is the official CODA specification in English from the Belgian Bankers’ and Stockbroking Firms’ Association (Febelfin).

You are unlikely to find a C# library to work with this - banks are notorious for having systems from the iron age. Maybe if you wanted a Cobol or Fortran implementation you'll find something ;)

The document discusses SEPA for local transactions, and apparently SWIFT for international. SWIFT is the de facto banking wire format for all international transactions. SWIFT has several modern implementations in most languages, though it's simple enough to implement yourself in any way you want.

Danu

Thanks for the info, I keep on hoping for someone to actually have made this class already, if not i'll mark your answer as the bounty one and try to provide my class for it later on – Cofield

we are living in a sad world – Perl

Answer 2

Mvision, I couldn't find your contact details and I don't have enough reputation to comment yet.

Did you find or write a library/class to interpret CODA-statements yet? Could you please share it or share some insights on how you've written it? It would be much appreciated!

Meanwhile the standard has been updated to v2.4 (from v2.3 and v2.3a) of which you can find the English spec and the Dutch spec.

They include a changelog for v2.4 at the end and this is the changelog for v2.3a:

New category codes 435 and 436 and deleted category code 052

I found some existing implementations in Python compatible with CODA up to v2.2, one should be able to port this to C#: https://www.odoo.com/apps/modules?author=Noviat

Ynes

Yup I made my own implementation. I'm quite sure the company I work for won't let me open source it but I'll contact you later to share some ideas! Thanks for the heads up on 2.4! – Cofield

The ODOO code to read coda mentionned above is here. Hint to decipher the code: CODA is a line (=record) oriented standard with fixed line length. Coda v2.5 was released in March btw – Fusco